the.waz
Member
I recently picked up a secondhand Lanikai A/E six-string tenor. It has a solid top, Fishman electronics, and the price was good enough to not fuss about needing a little adjusting.
The one thing I’m having trouble addressing is that the saddle leans forward (toward the nut) in the saddle slot. Predictably, the intonation goes sharp as you fret up the neck; straightening the saddle would move the contact point about 2-3 mm away from the nut, which would help. One contributor seems to be that the piezo element (which looks to be a Fishman Sonicore) is thick and round. Because the element is thick, the saddle sits high in the slot and does not have a lot of vertical contact area with the “walls” of the slot to keep it straight. Because the element is round, it is hard for the saddle to make a nice, straight-down contact on the element. The tension of the strings pulls the top of the saddle forward, and the bottom of the saddle pushes the element into the rear corner.
Yesterday I removed the saddle to take a closer look. I could see the remnants of a marker line on the saddle where someone had obviously set it up to accommodate the thickness of the transducer. I noted that it was not sanded flat; the bottom had a slight bevel to it. My guess is that the bevel was unintentional. If it was intentional, it seemed to me be installed the wrong way; i.e. such that the saddle would lean toward the neck if it were sitting flat. But maybe that is irrelevant because it is not sitting flat, and reversing the saddle did not have any noticeable effect.
All my ideas of how to address this have issues of their own:
- Shim the front or back of the slot to make it narrower (kludgy)
- Rout or file the bottom of slot for the transducer to sit lower (risky)
- File the bottom of the saddle to be concave instead of flat to sit on the element better (never heard of anyone doing this)
Any ideas? Presently the action is dead on 3 mm for all strings at the 12th fret, so there is a little room to bring the saddle down, but not much.
The one thing I’m having trouble addressing is that the saddle leans forward (toward the nut) in the saddle slot. Predictably, the intonation goes sharp as you fret up the neck; straightening the saddle would move the contact point about 2-3 mm away from the nut, which would help. One contributor seems to be that the piezo element (which looks to be a Fishman Sonicore) is thick and round. Because the element is thick, the saddle sits high in the slot and does not have a lot of vertical contact area with the “walls” of the slot to keep it straight. Because the element is round, it is hard for the saddle to make a nice, straight-down contact on the element. The tension of the strings pulls the top of the saddle forward, and the bottom of the saddle pushes the element into the rear corner.
Yesterday I removed the saddle to take a closer look. I could see the remnants of a marker line on the saddle where someone had obviously set it up to accommodate the thickness of the transducer. I noted that it was not sanded flat; the bottom had a slight bevel to it. My guess is that the bevel was unintentional. If it was intentional, it seemed to me be installed the wrong way; i.e. such that the saddle would lean toward the neck if it were sitting flat. But maybe that is irrelevant because it is not sitting flat, and reversing the saddle did not have any noticeable effect.
All my ideas of how to address this have issues of their own:
- Shim the front or back of the slot to make it narrower (kludgy)
- Rout or file the bottom of slot for the transducer to sit lower (risky)
- File the bottom of the saddle to be concave instead of flat to sit on the element better (never heard of anyone doing this)
Any ideas? Presently the action is dead on 3 mm for all strings at the 12th fret, so there is a little room to bring the saddle down, but not much.
But seeing your replies, I went ahead and did it…and it wasn’t too bad, even if it took a hot minute to remove enough material from the blank to accommodate the element (without deepening the slot). I also ended up putting a slight bevel on the front top of the saddle to move the contact point even further back. And I lowered a couple of the nut slots for which the first fret intonation was sharp.
